How we tell the story of African film history
For most outsiders, modern Ethiopian cinema means Haile Gerima and Salem Mekuria. But others, in addition to these, made its rich cinema history.
6426 Article(s) by:
Paul Milchick
Paul Milchik is a pseudonym for the author of this piece. His name has been changed due to his status as an international student in the US during the second Trump administration, in a context where foreign students have been targeted for detention and deportation as a result of expressing pro-Palestinian views.
The skeleton in the closet
The novelist Nadifa Mohamed complicates Britain’s troubled, racist legal history through the personal tale of one otherwise insignificant person, a Somali immigrant to Cardiff in Wales.
Life to the sound of gunfire
Nigerians fleeing extremist violence at home take refuge across the border in Niger among an already fragile population. Together they proceed to carve out a way to live better lives for now.
A big African literature prize in an African language
The Kiswahili Prize works to undermine the marginalization of African languages in literary culture. An interview with one of its founders.
Like a bad rain year
The consequences of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine for African food security and the need for greater food sovereignty.
No amount of foreign currency can justify this
The dire, often fatal, conditions that African, and in this case specifically Kenyan, domestic workers are facing in the Middle East.
The “alternative” money economy of Nigerian students
In Northern Cyprus, African students, many of them Nigerian, study diligently for tertiary degrees while juggling multiple income streams in a peer-to-peer system for collective survival.
We are actually reading
The Radical Books Collective teams up with Africa Is a Country to bring you progressive conversations about books, literature, and publishing on this platform.
Patrick Lyoya’s life mattered
The harrowing execution of Patrick Lyoya, a Congolese refugee in Michigan, and the unfulfilled promise of resettlement in America.
The doctor from District Six
The University of Edinburgh will award an honorary doctorate to Joe Schaffers, a working-class educator from Cape Town, South Africa. It will be a new benchmark for this tradition.
Against the youth fetish in politics
Politics is about effectiveness, and casting youth as a political subject (rather than simply a demographic), is a bad way to do politics.
Is the academic boycott of Israel a violation of academic freedom?
A decision to rescind an invitation to Israeli academics to a conference in South Africa, revived a tactic of the anti-apartheid struggle. Is it effective?
African liberation and African scholarship
The Sixth International Congress of African and African Diaspora Studies in Accra in August 2023 foregrounds the struggle against African Studies as a form of knowledge production located, for the most part, outside Africa.
Democraticizing money
Cameroonian economist Joseph Tchundjang Pouemi died in 1984, either poisoned or by suicide. His ideas about the international monetary system and the CFA franc are worth revisiting.
Bookends: Khadija Abdalla Bajaber
The author of ‘The House of Rust’ tells us all the little things (from foods to films) that get her imagination going.
The Mexico option
Mexico is fighting to regain sovereignty over its energy future, and African Leftists would do well to look to it for some answers.
World Refugee Day from the US-Mexico border
For World Refugee Day, Africa Is a Country Radio visited Tijuana, Mexico to talk with Josiane Moukam about what life is like for African migrants at the US border.
A new politics, from the ground up
Cape Town-based activist Axolile Notywala wants to bring people from different backgrounds together to build a movement on what it means to be free in South Africa.
Punks of the Witwatersrand
The Rise and Fall of National Wake, South Africa’s first multiracial punk band at the height of apartheid, that sang about state violence and political freedoms.
Land grabs and conservation propaganda
To preserve biodiversity, protected area lands should be returned to African indigenous communities who play an essential role in conservation.